I guess it shouldn't surprise me, but the more time I spend talking about typography to people who are into it, the more people want to know as much about my nerdy type tattoos as they want to know about whatever I'm supposed to be talking about. As a result, I've been featured in a couple of videos that just take a look at my scrawny arms with their interesting markings:

From the AIGA, our hosts: “Gathering rare and unique works from premier archives in the United States and London, “Century” will serve as the hub of a series of presentations, workshops and events held at the AIGA gallery as well as the Type Directors Club and the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at Cooper Union in New York City. The “Century” exhibition features a range of artifacts representing the evolution from typeface conception to fonts in use. Typeface production drawings by the preeminent designers of the last 100 years, proofs, type posters and announcement broadsides are supplemented by publications, advertising, ephemera and packaging.”

You know when you’ve been noticing something creep up on you over time? Things you begin seeing, filing away, forming into a pattern? Yesterday, I was looking at a bunch of projects by student designers, and a certain trend snapped into focus. It was so instantly, immediately clear the first time I saw an example, and by the 6th I was really frustrated that so many people had veered toward the same solution without thinking much about context. I worry about things like this in design — especially when I see it in student work — because I began to worry that a style becomes a tic, a reflex that may not be questioned or considered well enough.

You try. Can you notice the pattern forming, the approach that has become a kind of template for a certain kind of work?

Adhesiontext

Emil Ruder’s Spacing Test

This comes from this Typophile thread on spacing, and refers back to Emil Ruder’s Typographie published 1967. The idea is that the first group of words contain the more easily combined shapes, while the second sets contain trickier combinations, such as the accursed diagonals! The two sets of words should achieve pretty even overall color if a typeface is spaced pretty well. The Typophile thread presents the words in lists, but I find it easier to set paragraphs side-by-side and compare results as I work on spacing.

Kern King

Leslie's Cabarga’s Kern King is another test I’ve been using for ages. It contains words that represent the most common character combinations. The list is biased heavily toward English, but it contains a bunch of foreign and made-up words just to be a little more thorough. Just in case the link ever breaks, I’ll simply quote it here:

How to Use Kern King

First, complete the spacing of your font in progress, but before adding kerning . . . paste [this text] into a word processing or layout program document, look at the words in lowercase, then as all caps, and see how they set. Make a list of all the problem pairs: those that are too far apart, and those that are too close together. Open up the font again in Fontographer or FontLab, make corrections to spacing and add kerning. Generate the font a second time. Check again. Repeat process until [spacing and] kerning seems perfect.

Digits of pi

My favorite way to check figures as I work on them is to fill preview windows, test documents, etc with digits of pi. It’s a great way to look for gaps or dark spots in the overall color, and check for that tricky sweet spot between even color and clarity of individual numbers. Also a great way to compare blocks of tabular figures against blocks of proportional figures.

Pangrams

My most frequently visited page on Wikipedia is the multilingual List of pangrams page. It’s a great way to check that a design holds together once you start figuring out accent marks, or to try character combinations you might not think about on your own. I edited down the lists on that page to a briefer text that tests various languages using the Latin alphabet:

Bruce Rogers, drawing of the typeface Centaur for the Monotype release, 1929. Source

What, these old things?

I’m being glib, I know. I legitimately feel privileged that part of my job is to work with these incredible, unique materials and help show them to the world. However, it does give me a tremendous kick to see work I’ve been involved with in my day job job appear in my Tumblr feed when I least expect it. In this case, it almost took me a second to realize that the Centaur drawings were being posted by the superb Design Is Fine, because I am so used to seeing this particular photo and these particular drawings. In fact, the caption is even one that I wrote originally, when we were preparing material for the Monotype Recorder/Pencil to Pixel mini-site.

I’ve made a point over the last few years of getting material from Monotype’s archive out into the open more often. It requires a lot of care to make sure the materials are protected, but I truly believe these are most valuable if they are seen and discussed in a way that makes it clear how much they connect to what we do today. What I’ve found from showing things like original lettering drawings and the mechanical type drawings made from them is that people get really excited about seeing physical artifacts that connect to design work that they’ve most experienced digitally. I think fonts are a particular case, too, as it is so easy to take them for granted when they appear in ever-expanding pull-down menus. When people see the hand-drawn shapes it is much easier to realize that even though few designers draw out a complete typeface in pencil these days, those shapes have to come from somewhere, and a person will have been involved in drawing those shapes.

I full-on love the part of my job that lets me be archivist and historian. LOVE. IT. I love spending time with these materials and learning more and more about what went into producing them, and I love getting to digest all that information and use to get people excited about what can they can do with typography now.

OMG AMG! I just noticed that the days of the week in 2014 are going to line up with those in my 1964 Athletic Model Guild calendar. I'm already a big fan of Bob Mizer's work, so expect to see more of this this throughout the year!

It’s pretty common to hear people shake an angry fist at the close of a year, and I’ve certainly done the same. All in all, though, this past year was pretty spectacular for me. Lots of opportunities came my way, I was generally able to make the most of those, I got to do a lot of cool things, and I had fun a lot, regardless of a fair amount of stress. (This was probably the year I became a workaholic once and for all.)

I did a lot of cool things and met some intimidatingly talented people through work, and seized some great chances to do things like come back to New York and look after things going on here. I saw a couple of my old favorite bands — The Specials and Chucklehead — play some fantastic reunion shows. I made new friends, and got back in touch with some old ones. I travelled a lot! (So, so much travel.) It was often exhausting, but also fun to see Manchester, Ditchling, Boston, Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Savannah, Stockholm, Guwahati, New Delhi, Bologna, Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Berlin, Paris, and probably some others I can’t remember. I had many feelings, some simple and some more complicated. I stayed healthy, and thought a lot about how I spent a long time assuming that would never be the case by now.

So in all honestly, I just hope 2014 doesn’t suffer too much by comparison. I hope I avoid a few obstacles looming on the horizon. I hope all goes well with a few big projects. I hope I get more time with my folks. I hope new exciting things come my way, too.

I’ve been having a serious dilemma with this entire web site for the last few years. Ultrasparky.org doesn’t really serve much purpose any more, and it hasn’t for some time. At the same time, I don’t want to retire the site itself because it’s been my primary online home for longer than most people have been using the internet. The blog itself — the core around which the site is built — is not a blog anymore. It’s not a log of anything on the web anymore. At best, it’s a place where I dump press clippings for posterity, or write the occasional bit of fluff that runs longer than a tweet.

The things that this blog once gave this blog a purpose — a forum for personal writing, a way of connecting to other people doing the same — are long since dead, killed by the growth of the medium itself. Too may people came to see the personal stuff, but without the context of all the stuff that came before it. The idea of keeping a blog as a mental mood board of things that you like was killed by platforms that made that mode of writing commercially viable and too tightly focused for me to bother with it. The social aspect was the first part to die, really, and the part that can never be resuscitated now that online interaction has moved from blogrolls and trackbacks and comment threads to juggernauts that make it too seductively easy to keep up with people in a constellation of commercial platforms rather than my own little homestead.

I certainly don’t mean to critique social media for this. I am far too avid a user of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, et al. to think they are awful, or even a problem. They make it so easy to do many things, but it does pain me a bit that they all do what they do better than I could ever do here, and they separate a big, messy experience that I once enjoyed into so many splinters of activity.

The means of publishing and sharing ideas, recommendations, activities, or other things on the web have become too mature in their own ways to even make it simple to fold them back into this format, as I used to do with all my side projects that had run their course, like Rumpus Room, the Poseable Thumbs, the Trusty Sidekicks, the WYSIWYG Talent Show, and others. I don’t have the technical chops to fold in activity from my Facebook feed, multiple Twitter accounts, my many Tumblr blogs, and other online presences, nor do I think it would even make sense for that material to sit here without the hooks to other people that make them all work so well in their own spaces.

There is, of course, the divide between the personal and the professional — the private and the public — which is nothing new to lie or too the web, but becomes much more of a hassle with maturity. I think the diplomatic issues about an online presence has dampened the spark of far more of the blogs I once followed than defection to other platforms. I certainly have grappled with it over and over again over the years, and this was never even the place for all my stories even at its most candid.

Still, I can’t bring myself to shut the doors and turn out the lights. I've lived here far longer than anyplace I’ve lived physically, and I don’t want to erase or simply archive over 17 years of online output and declare, “That’s that!”. Lasting this long his has been, in many ways, the greatest thing I have ever done, even if the blog and I are only limping along at this point. What should I bother to do here, if no else is paying attention anymore?

I’m certainly not alone in this dilemma. Jason Kottke has been thinking about the death of the blog. Frank Chimero has been thinking about how to defrag one's online activity and gather it together in one spot again. I would love to see some tools for bringing the richness of my overall online experience back into my own home, but it’s hard to imagine what that would be like, and how it would connect to the older material on this site. But who knows? Perhaps this is the year I can find a way to breathe some life into this old idea.

I have always consideredValley Girl the most self-aware, perfectly crafted 80s movie of them all. The soundtrack is sublime, and was painfully hard to find before the era of digital music. I carefully looked after my copy of a popular bootleg cassette that had this soundtrack on one side, and the (also seminal) soundtrack to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on the other.